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1.8.2-Sarah1281
Brick!Club 1.8.2 Fantine Happy Fantine asks about Cosette but she believes she knows and is so certain of Madeleine’s goodness and what he has done that he can’t bring himself to tell her the truth the way he could confess at Arras. Fantine says she saw him when she was sleeping and he was in a glory and surrounded by celestial forms. That doesn’t sound inaccurate given he had just come from Arras. He does tell her something but we don’t know what it was since he was so worked up he can’t even remember but if he told her the truth she wasn’t listening and the doctor assured her Cosette was there since there was no need to distress a dying woman. Fantine calls the doctor an ass for not letting her see her child and, if Cosette were really there, it would make sense but he’s just trying to protect her. She’s still got some spirit in her. She immediately recants when the doctor hints that that behavior will keep Cosette from her longer. If Cosette were really there then no one would have any busniess keeping the two apart but, of course, she’s not. "She turned towards him; she was making a visible effort to be calm and "very good," as she expressed it in the feebleness of illness which resembles infancy" for the obligatory heartbreaking line of the chapter. I don’t think that this sort of thing is "charming" which Hugo said it was earlier but really problematic. She’s trying so hard to "be good" so they’ll let her see her own daughter after five years and if they really could have produced Costte I would be so annoyed with them. She asks if Valjean had a pleasant journey and understands that Cosette cannot possibly remember her after all this time but she doesn’t care. As long as she’s happy and well taken care of. She says that children are like birds and her own daughter is the lark. "You are the master"…I am not having flashforwards with that line. I am absolutely not having flashfowards with that line. Valjean lies about Cosette as well and Fantine is coughing between every few words in that whole huge speech. Fantine was there once five years ago and even she knows that the Thenardiers picked a terrible spot for an inn. How did that even happen? Valjean had come to tell her something really true but now he can’t since she’s so close to death and the shock might kill her. At least Fantine hears an actual child singing and thinks it’s Cosette instead of hallucinating one like in the movie. Once more we get to the theme of poor and overwhelmed people not even having the words for their mistreatment or perceived mistreatment and so are just reduced to calling everyone wicked and it is really sad. She’s making all sorts of happy plans for the future that cannot be and absolutely don’t remind me of anything that hasn’t happened yet. She has to calculate how old Cosette is! Then she stops, terrified, as Javert has appeared. Commentary Doeskin-pantaloons I hadn’t even thought to compare Valjean’s dramatic telling of the truth in the previous chapters with all the lying that is going on in this one. It was so hard for him to tell the truth to confess his crimes, but of course he did, in order to save Champmathieu (and also his own soul). No-one has nearly as much angst about lying to Fantine, although god knows why any of them are. Although this time telling the truth would not ‘save’ anyone, and I think that Hugo would have us believe that telling Fantine the truth would actually make her lose all hope, and ultimately condemn her to death. In the previous chapters Hugo kind of concluded that although Valjean telling the truth about his identity would fuck over the whole area, and save just one man, it was still the right thing to do - because it was the truth. And now, conversely, we have a corruption of that ideal: even Simplice is perpetuating this lie to Fantine. I guess Hugo is telling us that ideals should never really be set in stone?